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When will Sony support Vulkan on PS?

• departure4885 1y ago
  Why would they? They have their own (two actually) proprietary graphics APIs: GNM and GNMX.
  • shmerl 1y ago
    I'd ask why wouldn't they. Not a fan of NIH and wheel reinvention proponents.
    • departure4885 1y ago
      Because if they write their own they get to own the political/bureaucratic portion of the problem. For better or worse, they don't have to deal with the Kronos Group. They get to optimize their APIs directly against their research with AMD.
      • shmerl 1y ago
        That still doesn't make NIH a better approach. NIH is dinosaur idea really when it comes to technology like this.
        • MBCook 1y ago
          Why would Vulkan, as opposed to a custom solution designed to target that hardware and games specifically, be a better solution? If you’re making a PS game you’re already doing tons of bespoke PS stuff. If you don’t want to deal with it there are plenty of pieces of middleware out there to help. Honestly these “where’s Vulkan” posts on every bit of 3D capable hardware feel like a stupid meme at this point as opposed to a rational question. Maybe they should just ship DX12. That’s multi-platform too.
          • shmerl 1y ago
            Because it won't tax developers with the need to learn yet another NIH. Same reason any standard exists and makes things easier for those who use it. Honestly any idea that defends NIH like this belongs with dinosaurs. NIH is a stupid meme, not the opposite of it.
            • soulbadguy 1y ago
              And most of the standard we have now starts with something similar to NIH. Vulkan itself is an offshoot of mantel from AMD. There are valid reason to have a custom api. Especially in domain like game console with hardware with long release cycle, tight performance requirement and legacy (ps4) code to support.
              • shmerl 1y ago
                Good, but if it's actually a standard - that's the benefit. If it's not - it's just NIH as in lock-in.
            • pjmlp 1y ago
              Vulkan is a mess as bad as OpenGL, to the point Khronos has been forced to public admit it didn't went out as planned, is yet again an extension spaghetti, and they are now trying to clean the house with the Vulkan Roadmap introduced at Vulkanised 2025. That is how good Khronos "design by commitee APIs" end up being.
              • shmerl 1y ago
                This comment is just a bunch of bunk, but regardless, Vulkan is the only thing that's a collaborative effort, whether it's a mess or not. NIH proponents have nothing to offer as an alternative.
                • pjmlp 1y ago
                  Market and tooling, industry has usually ignored Khronos APIs when multiple APIs are available to chose from, e.g. Nintendo Switch.
    • MindSpunk 1y ago
      Sony's low level APIs for PS4 and PS5 (it doesn't use GNM) is almost a direct mapping to the hardware with very little abstraction compared to Vulkan/DX12. Vulkan is still very high level compared to what's going on inside the driver. There's no point paying the cost of Vulkan's abstractions when half the point of a game console is to have a fixed hardware target, hence GNM.
      • shmerl 1y ago
        It's basically same AMD GPU and you can compile SPIR-V into its machine code optimally without any kind of made up "I'm closer than close to the hardware" secrets. Compiler optimizations are done all the time (see Valve's aco and AMD's llvm based compiler). Vulkan is more than adequate to handle things for the hardware on the API side so I don't buy the claim that they are somehow "closer than close" to be better.